Chevron widely deployed decision analysis in the early 1990s and it is now an integral part of the Chevron Project Development and Execution Process. This talk will provide a brief overview of the oil and gas industry and of Chevron. Decision Analysis is a career path at Chevron, and typical decision analyst roles will be discussed, using an offshore Gulf of Mexico project as an example. The decision analysis process and decision quality provide clarity of action for Chevron.
William “Bill” Klimack, Ph.D. is Chevron’s decision analysis functional manager. A retired U.S. Army Colonel, he was the Director of the Operations Research (OR) and Systems Engineering (SE) Programs, the OR Center of Excellence, and served as Head of the Dept. of Systems Engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Following his Army career he worked as a consultant supporting the federal government. Subsequent consulting work involved helping clients select portfolios of oil and gas opportunities and project development planning. Pharmaceutical consulting included establishing optimal R&D portfolios, forecasting technical and market success, and analysis of disease burden and estimating disease prevalence. He has a BS in chemical engineering from Lehigh University, a MS in applied mathematics from Johns Hopkins, a MMAS from the US Army Command and Staff College, and PhD in OR from the US Air Force Institute of Technology. He is a Certified SE Professional, a licensed Professional Engineer, and a Fellow of the Society of Decision Professionals, the Royal Geographic Society and the Explorers Club. He is a recipient of the Decision Analysis Society Practice Award and an employee when Chevron received the Raiffa-Howard Award for Organizational Decision Quality. He is the immediate past President of the Society of Decision Professionals and a former Vice President of Meetings for the INFORMS. He was a co-Chair of the INFORMS Analytics Certification Task Force.